Tieline Delivers for Townsquare Media

Townsquare Media is the third largest US radio network and Mike
Hutchens is a Regional Engineer for the company based in
Evansville, Indiana. He oversees the engineering requirements for
stations in Indiana, Illinois and Maine and has helped to install
22 recently purchased Merlin PLUS IP codecs.

“Not so long ago, every time we needed to do a remote we would
need to set up a Marti remote system. This required significant
resources and thankfully these days there are much simpler remote
broadcast options available,” said Mike.

Townsquare Media’s Mike Hutchens

with his Tieline codecs

“Our first Tieline purchase four years ago included four
Commander G3 field units and two Commander G3 rack units, which
have been used regularly by WKDQ, WGBF, WJLT and WDKS for remotes,”
he said. “Typically each station does sales remotes over 3G, 4G LTE
or POTS connections from different locations so flexibility and
portability is critical. These units are also used to broadcast
entire shows.”

“We recently organised a toy drive for 911 Gives Hope, which
supplies toys to four hospitals in Evansville and Henderson. We set
up a remote studio under a tent in the local Walmart car park and
configured four Commander field units to broadcast over IP, one for
each station. All codecs were connected to a single cable modem
switch and each station broadcasted all day, without interruption.
On the laptops we used a VPN to connect to the automation system at
the studio so our jocks at the toy drive had control over their
station programming.”

Merlin Magic

“Last May I was one of the first people to demo Tieline’s New
Merlin PLUS codec capable of hosting 6 simultaneous remotes from a
single 1RU unit,” said Mike. “I was so impressed that we bought the
codec and I never sent it back!” “At that stage we had dipped a toe
in the water and successfully used Tieline’s Report-IT Enterprise
smartphone app over the previous year with our Commander G3s.
Everyone responded very positively to the app and its simple one
touch connection to go live.”

“I became convinced about deploying Report-IT widely when one
non-technical on-air person came back to the studio one day and
said it was a great improvement and that they didn’t want to go
back to the old gear. The Report-IT Enterprise app has become a
game changer and is now loaded onto all our announcers’ iPads for
live cut-in remotes.” “For the most part we use iPads to run
Report-IT (in my market of Evansville/Owensboro) and generally just
use the built-in iPad mic. It really is quite remarkable how good
it can sound. When we’re going to be somewhere that has a lot of
background noise we do have some external iRig cables to allow us
to use a set of headphones and a mic which works very well.”

“Our jocks love Report-IT and how it has helped to transform
their iPads into a lightweight portable remote kit. The iPad also
doubles as a capture device for updating our Facebook page and
website with images and other information.”

“On the Merlin PLUS I have ‘hard-wired’ one input/output to each
of our 4 stations and the other two in/outs operate as spares for
when the stations wish to do multiple simultaneous remotes.”

“Townsquare Media has recently purchased 22 additional Merlin
PLUS codecs and 200 additional Report-IT Enterprise user licenses
which are being deployed throughout the US. I am currently
configuring the Report-IT user accounts using the Tieline Tieserver
Console web browser graphical user interface. Accounts can be
configured remotely via a PC, or you can download the free Android™
or iOS Tieserver Console app and use a smartphone or tablet for
configuration.”

“Some of the Merlin PLUS units are WheatNet-IP enabled to suit
our Wheatstone studios,” he said. “This simplifies integration and
makes it easier to set up mix-minus feeds for remotes.” “Combining
Tieline’s Merlin PLUS codec with Report-IT has delivered our
stations greater remote flexibility. The workflow for all of our
simple remotes has been streamlined and we have freed up
significant resources for other purposes. Our Commander G3 codecs
are now utilized for more complex remotes which require multiple
mics and we have sufficient excess capacity across the board to
handle requests for additional resources as required.”